Patristic Arguments against the Eternity of the World

Abstract

According to Aristotle himself, all the philosophers before him are agreed that the world was generated, which implies that he was the first to introduce the conception of an ungenerated world; but, according to John Philoponus, Aristotle was only the first among the natural philosophers who discovered a new method to establish the principle that the world had no beginning. Among the Church Fathers, Lactantius sometimes attributes the belief in the eternity of the world explicitly to Aristotle, but sometimes he refers it vaguely to “those who say that the world always existed.” Vague references to a belief in the eternity of the world, or to such a belief described as held by some people or by some philosophers, are to be found also in the works of such Fathers as Justin Martyr, Theophilus, Origen, Arnobius, Basil, Augustine, and Diodorus Tarsus. Two pre-Socratic philosophers are mentioned by some Fathers as exponents of the belief in the eternity of the world: Xenophanes by Hippolytus, Eusebius, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus; Pythagoras by Tertullian. Various arguments are used by the Fathers in their refutation of this view. These arguments, selected and grouped into six types, are the subject of discussion of the present paper.